What to Expect in the Xbox One’s April Update

While Microsoft and Sony’s consoles are still fresh and new, we can expect to see a lot of patches as they add in missing, broken, or promised functionality. The Xbox One had substantial updates in February and March that affected the user interface and social elements of the console.

Microsoft announced today to beta testers the elements we can look forward to seeing in the next Xbox One update. The post doesn’t confirm a release date, and suggests that the preview cycle will take longer than the previous update, so it’s tough to tell exactly when it’ll hit aside from sometime in April.

The forum post isn’t public, but a member of NeoGAF was generous enough to extract the info for everyone.

Each update so far has dished out one frequently requested improvement, alongside a bunch of others. The first was the battery indicator for controllers, the second was Party Chat functionality. This time around, the big one is friend notifications, with friends and favorites both getting the same sort of pop-up notifications we see now. My only concern with this is that notifications on Xbox One take up a lot more screen space, so I hope we’ll be able to restrict the notifications to favorites only.

A game save progress bar is being added to show save status, as well as the ability to tell which games and apps are being updated or have been updated. For European users, an update to Xbox One’s Blu-ray 50Hz video output will resolve issues with playback of content recorded at that refresh rate.

Kinect is once again being fine tuned – I would hope this appears in every update as long as the system is around. New audio settings will allow users to tune “how much volume is lowered when Kinect is used in communications,” and updates to how the system interacts with devices will help the Xbox better control your TV, DVR and receiver.

While these updates will eventually slow down, Microsoft is doing the right thing by keeping them rolling out regularly.